When David Fahl worked for an energy reseller, which bought and sold energy from generating companies, he noticed that getting things done right wasn't always as high a priority as making deadlines, meeting deliveries or being on budget.
"You can get all those things done without doing any good work," he says. It wore on him and didn't give him a sense of accomplishment.
In the past, people could see the fruits of their labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical.
You can't even leave your mark on a document in increasingly paperless offices. That may explain why to-do listers write down tasks they've already completed just to be able to cross them off.
"Not only is work harder to measure, but it's also harder to define success," says Homa Bahrami, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
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"The work is intangible or invisible, and a lot of work gets done in teams so it's difficult to pinpoint individual productivity," Bahrami said.
Jon Williams once worked in an auto-claims department where new-claim calls, which could take a half-hour, were tallied with the same weight as brief reminder calls to customers. Even so, his greatest sense of achievement was transforming an initially angry and frustrated customer into someone who was satisfied and even laughing. "That wasn't measured at all," he said.
The difficulty of putting your finger on what you've accomplished gives employees pangs. James Ault recently visited a municipal park where he worked in maintenance while in college.
He saw the signs he painted, the electrical job he wired and the trees he planted 35 years ago. Now he works on state energy policy where he spends hours debating policy issues.
"I've said to my wife on multiple occasions, 'It would be nice to be an electrician,' " he says. "You can take pride in what you've accomplished."